Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)

by Lisa Ann Verge

  She shifted her hips beneath him in unspoken welcome. With a groan, he slid all the way in.

  The tight fit of his hot, hard flesh, now sheathed all the way to her womb, made her arch her neck in pleasure. With her eyes closed and her mind reaching wild, the wall against his thoughts dissolved. She found herself in a place that dazzled with light, a place she knew she shared with him, for they had the same hunger, the same need, the same pressing desire to get closer, ever closer.

  He began moving, long, slick thrusts. She dug her fingers into the muscled swell of his shoulders as her blood raced. In her dizzy state, she imagined she could hear the skirl of pipes and the beat of deep-bellied drums, like some memory of a wild Lughnasa evening. The resonance of the thought-dream was like a pounding bodhrán whose quickening pace echoed in her heart.

  She gasped for more. He was trying to be gentle. She sensed the strain in his mind. But she was done with gentleness.

  Lachlan.

  She’d spoken with her thoughts but he reacted as if she’d shouted an order. He made a growling sound deep in his throat and shifted his weight to better grasp her hips. Their loins met with each hungry thrust. His thoughts stretched tight and her body responded, her inner muscles closing around him to the point of a deep, unbearable ache. In a breathless instant, the feeling loosened.

  An upsurge of sensation poured over her, rising and rising as he continued to thrust. She tightened her grip on his arms and felt his vibrating strength, the power he exerted to send her to greater heights of pleasure. Oh, to be taken like this by this man. Why had she hesitated at all? Why hadn’t she tempted him into this on Inishmaan? Wasn’t this worth a thousand lonely nights to come?

  Through the haze of her own bounding pleasure she felt his thrusting become shorter, more urgent. As the muscles of his arms flexed, she blinked her eyes open to see him throw his head back. His neck bulged as he shouted and spilled into her womb. The essence of him spread inside her, tingling and warm, a powerful new pleasure that made every sensation crash at once.

  She rode the curling wave as long as it lasted, lessening bit by bit. When it lapped in gentleness, she drifted down so she could once again feel the bend of the grass beneath her. He stayed stretched up, breathing hard, still inside her. After a moment or two his shoulders bowed and his head fell, his face obscured by the fall of his hair. She reached up to run her fingers through the tangle. She urged his head up so she could look into his heavy-lidded eyes. As she’d done so many times before, she pressed beyond the sight of his midnight-blue eyes into his mind.

  Then she fell into Lachlan.

  She plunged through his thoughts, feelings, dreams, and memories, a torrent of impressions that passed her like a blur. She had expected to hit the usual resistance when she looked into his eyes, and instead she’d hurled herself face-first through an open door.

  As if from a distance she heard him speak her name. That sound helped her focus and eased the headlong fall. His midnight-blue eyes filled her vision as she tried to slow her streak through his mind. She dug her fingers into his scalp. Bit by bit the landscape of his thoughts slowed.

  She struggled to make sense of it all.

  She struggled to take in the wonder of it all.

  Lachlan’s mindscape was a world without edges, a vast unfurling panorama of memories and dreams and ideas that stretched to an unseen horizon. For a brief moment she swept through a memory of a sun-drenched room where a younger version of Lachlan bent over a parchment, quill in hand, tracing a line of ink against a sharp plane of wood to meet with other lines. Her nose filled with the musty scent of books and goatskin bindings. Then, as if she were no more than a leaf in the wind, she propelled away from that memory into a landscape of a bright, endless city. She chased his attention from stone arches and flying buttresses, to the ribbing of vaulted domes, to the lines of cracks above colonnades. She flew through memories of workmen with wheelbarrows, chipping slate or weighing stones. She tried to absorb all the images of ropes and buckets and men turning wheeled gears to shift materials to the highest reaches of shaking scaffolding, all under a rain of dust.

  Then that rain of dust formed into numbers and symbols that reminded her of the odd lettering on some of Da’s books. Those numbers and letters and symbols swirled to form calculations that just as quickly exploded and reformed. A hail of other imagery fell, of bricks and forges, of planed wood and stone, of stirred mortar and iron spikes, of levers and shims. Constructs of his imagination shimmered by her like lightning. She saw enormous stones transported across a bed of rolling tree trunks, water works and sluices, wooden pathways through bogs, ditches and canals for draining and making new land.

  If she’d tumbled into Tír na nÓg, the silvery Otherworld found under the burial mounds of Ireland, she would have been less flummoxed by the land of the ancient gods with its promise of magical horses, green plains, and endless youth than she was by all of the fantasy machines rampant in Lachlan’s mind. Never had she brushed into a mind so free yet so bound to the earth, the stones, the trees, and the incredible configurations that he could craft of them.

  An ache pounded beneath her eyes and queasiness seized her, like what happened when she stood too close to the dolmen stones on the height of Inishmaan. She forced her eyes closed, the better to detach herself. Though she’d plunged deep inside the man, she suspected that there were places she’d not yet glimpsed, enough hidden rooms for her to explore for a lifetime. As she’d known from the first time he’d opened his eyes on the strand of Inishmaan, he was different from other men. Today, she understood exactly how different, how wonderful, how complicated.

  She let her hands slip off his scalp. She heard him suck in a breath, as if he’d felt something as she’d pulled away. When she finally could master speech again, she would ask him if he’d felt as immersed as she had. Right now, it took all her concentration to settle herself into her own body. She paid mind to the weight of him atop her. She felt the intimacy of him still pressed snug against her loins, where warmth and wetness remained. A fresh tingling awoke in her, the start of new desire.

  She dared to blink her eyes open once again. His head hung between his shoulders above her. She stretched up to plant a kiss upon his chest, but he was already rising off his elbows. His member slipped out of her, leaving a hollow ache behind. The cold air chilled the moisture between her thighs as he rolled onto his back. She found herself bereft, blinking up at an oculus of gray sky, rimmed by treetops.

  The word oculus echoed in her head, and two things struck her at once.

  First, that an oculus was a round opening in a building, like a window, or an eyelike design. It was not a word she knew. Somehow, Lachlan had put it in her head.

  Second, they had just made love on a lush patch of grass within a perfect circle of oak trees. Her mother called such places fairy rings, powerful cathedrals of the Sídh, a place fitting for the sacred.

  So lass,” Lachlan said, interrupting her thoughts with a voice that sounded strange. “Now you’ve truly had your way with me.”

  She turned her head against the soft grass, watching the way his throat moved. The expression of his profile confused her. His eyes were restlessly seeking something in the high boughs of the trees. His hands lay flat on his abdomen as if he were a man gut-slain, holding fast to his spilling innards.

  Confusion seeped through her. He must know that he’d pleased her beyond measure. Surely he could feel how her body thrummed with satisfaction, and not just from the lovemaking.

  But of course, she thought. It was the other thing that had unnerved him.

  She rolled on her side and pressed her body against his, breast to knee, the best way she could think of to express how much he’d pleased her. “Did you feel it,” she asked, “when our minds became one?”

  A jolt shot through him, and instantly she realized her mistake. Her father and brother had always barked in anger when they suspected she was reading their thoughts. How much worse it must be for
Lachlan, new to the experience, to be told so boldly that she’d been rooting around in all things private.

  “I felt a lot of things,” he said, still blinking straight up at the sky. “After watching you come, my mind wasn’t my own for a long time.”

  A tingling heat swept up her cheeks.

  “If it happens only then,” he added, “I’d be glad of it. You were all I was thinking of, in that moment.”

  She’d seen a lot more than his desire for her, and she sensed that realization was the root of his wary, uneasy behavior. She supposed she could play the part of an innocent and pretend that his blind lust was all she’d perceived, but her heart balked at the deception. She hadn’t left her home and followed Lachlan into the world only to pretend—as she did with every other outsider—that she didn’t have a gift.

  “It’s true,” she began, “that I felt a communion with you while we were…in the middle of things.” Why were there no good, loving words to describe what they just did, that breathless merging of their bodies? “But after, when we were both…finished, I could read you as if there had never been a wall between us.”

  “Even now?”

  She sent tentacles of thought toward him with care, not wanting to tumble head over foot again. “You’re blocked to me now.” He let out such a long, deep breath that she wondered how long he’d been holding it. “It’s a pity, Lachlan, because even a glimpse into your mind revealed so much good.”

  He stilled to stone. Undaunted, she ran her hand over his forearm, up past his wrist, to cover his hand with her own. He didn’t raise it from his abdomen or make any attempt to grasp it. She twisted her palm so that her fingers lay between his.

  “Listen to me,” she whispered against his shoulder. “Back on Inishmaan, when I thought about what might be hiding behind the black haze of your mind, I could only guess that you would be like other men, to some degree.”

  “So I’m to be judged against such a measure.”

  “There’s no judgement in it. I’ve been seeing into men’s thoughts since my thirteenth summer. I know the lusts that drive them, the overriding sense that their members are a grand thing of great wonder to be worshipped—”

  “Are they not?”

  “Perhaps some are.” She smiled at his unsteady stab at humor. “The irony is that most women yearn for a big heart more than a big…cock.”

  He remained as motionless as the church statues she’d seen as a child in the cathedral in Galway.

  “It is the way men and women are made,” she continued. “I accept that. And since you’re the heir to a chieftaincy, I could only expect from what I’ve seen in the other noblemen that you would have lofty aspirations, bloodlust, even a craving for a crown of antlers upon your head. But Lachlan—” she squeezed his hand “—what I saw defied everything I expected.”

  His fingers twitched under her grip. Against her lips she felt the slightest softening in his body, a statue shifting into life.

  “It was but a glimpse,” she hedged, “but I saw you as a boy in your uncle’s house in Rome. Your hair was long and coming out of the rawhide tie at your neck. You sat upon two books to reach the desk. Around you were parchments held open with broken pieces of veined marble, and you were drawing lines on a slate. You were sketching an arch of some sort—”

  “A bridge,” he interrupted. “My uncle had tasked me to measure the forces, to craft the size of each arch.”

  “Yes.” She squeezed his hand again, and this time his palm lifted from his abdomen. “I saw that. It was a lovely memory, but an unusual one to rise to the front of your thoughts in that moment after we finished…loving.”

  His brows drew together. “That time in Rome,” he said. “That was the moment I knew—”

  He swallowed his words. She wished she could slip into his mind and see the battle raging inside. But even as the thought passed through her mind, she had a sudden insight into what he meant to say.

  “It was the moment you knew what you most desired,” she said, a flush rising within her at the implications. “It was the moment you found true happiness.”

  He turned his head toward her. She met his midnight-blue eyes and the soft expression within them. Suddenly, she didn’t mind that she couldn’t see his thoughts, for there was something wondrous in this thrumming sense of intimacy that had nothing to do with the certainty that could come with her gift.

  “You felt something, didn’t you?” she whispered. “When my mind sank into yours?”

  “Yes.”

  A spiral of excitement rose up in her. She’d never had anyone to talk to about her gift. Even her brother, to whom she was closest, shut right up when she asked him too many questions.

  She said, “Tell me what it felt like.”

  “Lass,” he said on a hitching breath, “it’s not as easy as that.”

  “Please, Lachlan. I need to know.”

  He rolled to his side to face her. He ran a hand over the curve of her hip, up and down, sending shivers of sensation across her skin.

  He said, “I need you to tell me something first.”

  “Anything.”

  “I want you to describe what it felt like when I put myself inside you.”

  She flushed. “Lachlan—”

  “Not so easy, is it?”

  The corner of his lips twitched, a soft, teasing smile that made her heart turn over. “If you can make me understand what that felt like, lass, maybe I can answer your question better.”

  The skin on her cheeks all but sizzled. She had no reason to be squeamish about talking about such things. Hadn’t she mind-witnessed half the island of Inishmaan rutting in one place or another? Those fragmented, heated memories always seemed to float to the top of everyone’s thoughts. But she didn’t have the language to describe such a thing, and her tongue tangled when she tried to summon words. Since being with Lachlan, she’d realized that seeing the act through other people’s minds and experiencing it herself were two different things altogether.

  So, for a moment, she let herself wallow in the memory of what they’d just done. She envisioned Lachlan looming over her, spreading her legs wide, lodging the tip of his shaft against the ache that had been building up inside her since he first kissed her on Inishmaan. The memory was as visceral as if he were right now tracing his tongue over her hip, instead of his fingers. Her cleft responded in eager anticipation, three hungry squeezes.

  His thumb against her lower lip brought her attention back to the moment. He watched her face as he rolled the pad of that thumb across the length of her mouth.

  “I felt an ache,” she said, when he finally dropped his thumb from her lip. “The feeling was deep inside me, where you…put yourself.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t want you to stop moving. Had a herd of wild boar come crashing through these woods, I wouldn’t have torn myself away.”

  She thought she saw desire flare in his eyes, but he made no move to kiss her. The silence stretched, an unspoken command to continue.

  “I wanted to open myself wider, to take your…cock…more deeply inside me.” She ran her hand up his abdomen, over his chest, loving the velvet-hardness beneath her palm. “I wanted you to touch me everywhere. My breasts. My…” Her breath quickened and she felt another spasm between her legs. “I wanted to savor every stroke and at the same time I wanted you to stroke harder. I wanted to feel you, all the way to the root. I wanted you to tighten your grip on me because that spoke to how hungry you were to have me. I wanted you to stretch over me, cover me, breathe the same air, feel the same tightening. I wanted…”

  She struggled for the right word. What, precisely, did she crave in those intense moments? Did she want to lose all power of control? Be taken? Possessed? Each word was right, in its own way, but none was perfect.

  He said, his voice uneven, “You wanted to surrender.”

  She breathed, “Yes.”

  The word lingered in the air between them. It rang true, even though uneas
e plucked at her. To give herself so freely was to open herself to a dangerous vulnerability. She felt like she had just opened the deep recesses of her own mind for Lachlan’s perusal.

  Then all was a blur as he captured her lips. It was not a hungry kiss, but he made a meal of it anyway. He took her lower lip between his only to release it to capture the upper, and then captured them both with a kiss that left her panting, breathless, hungry for so much more than just kissing.

  He pulled away long enough to press his forehead against hers, murmuring half to himself, “Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.”

  Her blood thrumming, she did not have the capacity to understand what he said, and hardly the wits to wonder.

  “An old myth,” he explained. “Zeus argued with Hera about who enjoyed lovemaking more, men or women. They brought in the prophet Tiresias to judge.”

  Her ears absorbed his words, though her foggy mind did not.

  “Women won,” he continued. “Your sex enjoys lovemaking ten times more than mortal men. Until now, I would have disagreed.”

  “But,” she stuttered, “you took pleasure, before—”

  “Aye, I took physical pleasure. But after feeling you slip inside my mind, mo chridhe, I now understand the full pleasures of surrender.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Half the morning they’d been walking, but as long as Lachlan stayed close, Cairenn felt she could wander through these woods forever without growing weary. Though they’d spoken little since they returned to the campsite last night, a kind of communion buzzed between them. She could hardly sense the minds of all the other men trudging the same path because of the warmth she felt whenever Lachlan happened to glance back at her. He would raise one brow and his eyes would twinkle and suddenly she felt as if she were wrapped softly in thrice-brushed linen.

  Maybe that’s why she didn’t notice the troop of men on horses until Angus, at the head of the column, shot up a hand to order everyone to halt. Lachlan turned to her, his eyes sharp with expectancy. That look jolted her out of woolly daydreaming. She focused on the road below and then cast out the tentacles of her mind.